Category: Tech news

I’ve been playing with the Nokia Lumia 710 for a week or so now and I’m pleased to report that Nokia may have a chance. The phone, while a bit chintzy, is inexpensive, fast, and feature-rich. I doubt you’d be able to find a device as easy to use and comfortable as the 710 at a $50 price with two year contract.

We also tried the Meizu MX and came away, well, un-awed. It’s a cool phone, it’s only available in China right now, and there are a few bugs to work out before it could consider a second life on this side of the pond. I was more kind to it than Erick, but we’re both equally trepidatious.

Look for a full Lumia 710 review in a few hours and until then, enjoy our handsome mugs and even more handsome cellphones.

Customer relationship management startup Nimble has raised $1 million in funding from notable investors Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Don Dodge, Dharmesh Shah and more!

Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara views Nimble as a combination Hootsuite, Yammer and Salesforce. Unlike CRM tools like Salesforce, which Ferrara equates to stagnant databases of customers, Nimble takes into account that today’s salespeople are social.

Instead of having to cc: and bcc: their communications, Nimble users can OAuth into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google to bring their contacts and messaging to Nimble. Not only does the platform bring in contacts, but it also adjusts and lets you know when one of your contacts is using a different service. Users can control whether information is visible internally or not by setting the Nimble defaults to private.

“Ultimately in life and in business it’s social,” says Ferrara, “Nowadays you don’t just talk to customers on Twitter, sometimes you talk to them on Google Plus …”

Ferrara plans on using the funding to expand his 20 person team, making key hires in development and marketing Over 25K customers have joined Nimble since it’s public launch in September.

Commenting on blogs is broken. But what we need is a solution, not an abandonment of the concept. The question comes up every few months, but new social commenting technology means there are better answers now than ever before. Over the last day MG Siegler, MacStories, and mobile developer Mike Gemell have all written about choosing the nuclear option and turning off comments entirely on their sites. Their key reasons for doing so seem to be:

1. Comment reels are full of trolls, bile, and spam links
2. There’s no way for popular sites to keep up with comments on old posts
3. Comment reels give random people too much visibility and distract from primary content

Here are my proposed solutions to these problems. Disqus, Livefyre, Facebook, and WordPress, how about you race to see who can be first to offer all three:

1. Authenticated Identity Sign-In With Minimum Friend/Follower Count

When people have to tie their comments to their identity, they become a lot more civil. The issue with Facebook is that it’s easy to create a throwaway or dedicated commenting account to troll from. An ideal commenting system would allow the host to set a minimum friend count for commenting. A 20 friend count minimum would make it much harder to create a troll account, make bans more long-lasting, and ensure at least someone wants to hear what a commenter has to say.

Update: This is meant to authenticate a commenter’s identity, not to discriminate against loners. Those who don’t meet the requirement can always tweet at the author. An alternative I like, suggested by GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram and ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell, is a trust pyramid where veteran commenters approve newbies. This is similar to the system The New York Times is testing.

2. Ability To Lock Comments After A Certain Period Of Time

Long-standing authors have more historic content than they can possibly moderate. Comments on old posts are often irrelevant due to newer information that has emerged. I want the ability to lock down and prevent further comments on a post after a designated period of time. I could then commit to moderating and responding to comments on posts younger than a week, a month, or 6 months, and direct all those wishing to comment on old posts to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or elsewhere.

3. Dedicated Comments Page For Each Post

Comment shouldn’t be given even close to the same prominence as the post they refer to. Forcing readers to comment on social networks or their own blogs is too much work, and inefficient for an author to keep up with. A compromise would be the ability to host comments on a separate page linked to at the bottom of a post. It would also make the original post load faster, give sites more control over presentation, and create a dedicated discussion area.

–

Comments keep bloggers humble, honest, accurate, and in touch with their audience. Personally, I enjoy debating with people who think I’m wrong, as long as they’re civil. I really value my commenters and often update my articles with thoughts they’ve inspired or corrections they’ve cited.

With the above options, blogs of all sizes could conduct efficient, meaningful discourse with their readers. There’s no need to nuke the trolls. If we limit and hide them, we can coexist peacefully.

For more thoughts on why comments are important, check out rallies of support from GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram, AVC’s Fred Wilson, and Droid Life’s Ron Offringa.

Now this is just hilarious. Apparently this Arizona woman has been paying for “email” for almost a decade — even though it’s been available free for a while and free for Aol users since 2006.  According to a year-old “New Yorker” article by Ken Auletta, over 75% of the dial-up portion of Aol’s 3.5 million subscribers are like Traci Casale. So why are these idiots people still paying for email? I mean you know things are bad when a publication called “Arizona Family” is making fun of you.

Well actually Casale and others like her are not being charged for email, they’re technically still paying for the dial-up plan they signed up for originally, which they didn’t cancel after Aol made its software package free.

“One day I just looked at, you know, you’re going through your bills and every bit helps right now and I’m like, ‘Why am I paying for email? No one else is,’ Casale says naively in the report.

Maybe it’s not entirely her fault? According to one source, Aol intentionally doesn’t try too hard to educate these legacy customers about their email package now being free. We also heard that when Aol came out with the new “Project Phoenix” Mail product in 2010, many in Aol Consumer Applications wanted to market it as being free but their suggestions were overturned by higher-ups as the pecentage of misinformed subscribers still ponying up just to use Aol Mail is very profitable.

Aol’s over 3.5 million dial-up subscribers brought in $191 million in revenue last quarter — which is still where the majority of Aol’s profits come from according to Auletta.

The reason why these local news reports are so sad is that even Cave Creek, Arizonans have figured out dial-up is a dying business. Sure Aol tries to sugarcoat this in earnings reports by boasting about its lowered subscription churn rate, but in plain English this basically means that there are fewer people leaving because there are fewer people to leave.

“AOL Mail is a web-based product that is free to all users regardless of their paid relationship with us,” Aol PR told me when I inquired as to why these headlines (somewhat mistakenly) accuse them of charging for it. Well, that explanation is much more clear than this vaguely-worded “Project Phoenix” press release.

Disclosure (in case you live under a rock): Techcrunch is owned by Aol.

“Hey, can I see your phone real quick?”

Oh, crap. What tabs did you leave open in Safari? Did you delete those photos (you know, those photos. The ones you promised her you’d delete?) That My Little Pony app that you totally-installed-just-to-test-your-download-speed-seriously-shut-up… is it still there?

Quick, hand it over before you pique their curiosity! Or say “no” and be the weirdo who wouldn’t hand their phone over to a friend for a second. If only there were some sort of on-the-fly middle ground — a “Guest Mode”, if you will.

As smartphones march toward ubiquity, so does the trend of passing them around between friends. Meanwhile, we cram (and then forget all about) more and more private junk into our phones each and every day. All the photos? All the voicemails? All the the still-logged-in social network accounts? I don’t even keep anything remotely salacious on my phone, and I’m still terrified that I’m handing over album after album of booty pictures I never even actually took anytime I pass off my phone.

Here’s the dream: one lock-screen, two PINs. One for me, one for anyone else who might use my phone but doesn’t necessarily need to see everything.

You see, I don’t mind if my friends want to challenge my ridiculous Fruit Ninja skills. They want to boot up Google Maps and be the Chewbacca (read: co-pilot) to my Millenium Falcon (read: Honda)? Great. They need to look something up and their 90′s brick phone can’t handle such techno-voodoo? Here, use mine! I trust them not to run off with my phone — they are my friends, after all.

That doesn’t mean I want them to be a tap or two away from everything.

Thus, the two PINs. Punch in your private PIN, your phone unlocks as normal. Punch in the guest PIN, it hides anything that prying eyes may sneak (or accidentally stumble) into. Your browsing history gets hidden, and all but a hand-picked, whitelisted set of apps completely disappear. Unlike a simple one-tap “Guest Mode” button, however, people you don’t want using your phone at all (like, say, dirty, dirty phone thieves) still can’t.

Things of a distantly similar vein have been built for Android — those I’ve seen, however, are all simply single-purpose apps (like games or activities for kids) that can’t be exited without a password. I’ve yet to see anything implemented system-wide. Why? Get on it, Apple. Or Google. Or Microsoft. Hell, everyone do it.

Update: Hah! Looks like I’m not the only one who wants this.

Wall Street was not super-impressed with today’s announcement of Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson. The stock was down 2 percent in the morning and ended the day down 3 percent. I spoke with analyst Colin Gillis of BGC Financial in the video above who says the drumming the stock got was “less a vote on Scott’s ability” than a “vote on Yahoo not going private.”

Chairman Roy Bostock squashed any hopes of a private sale of the company, but assured investors during a conference call today that Yahoo would proceed with plans to sell off its Asian assets. Gillis notes that Yahoo needs a CEO to do a ‘cash-rich” split, which involves picking assets to place in a new holding company and splitting it off.

But the big question is after he sells off the Asian assets, which by some calculations account for nearly all of Yahoo’s current $19.6 billion market cap,asks Gillis, “What will he be able to do materially different from Carol Bartz?”

Thompson does not have an easy task ahead of him, especially since Yahoo’s business model of trying to sell premium ad inventory on the web is “looking increasingly archaic” as the display advertising business changes with the onslaught of ad exchanges, Google, and DSPs. Yahoo’s share of the U.S. online display advertising market is declining—from 14.4 percent in 2010 to 13.1 percent in 2011, according to eMarketer. Thompson needs to turn that around and somehow reignite revenue growth. In the meantime, Wall Street remains skeptical.

“I love the name of honor, more than I fear death” – Julius Caesar. Google does too, apparently. The company has lowered the PageRank of its Chrome download page after violating its own paid link policy during a sponsored blog post campaign for the browser by Google’s ad agency Unruly Media. Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts responded to criticism of the campaign last night, saying his team “has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days”. Some accuse Google of lying about not knowing it was buying sponsored blog posts through Unruly. I argue it might have thought it was buying StumbleUpon Paid Discovery or other legitimate ads.

For background, earlier this week Google hired Unruly Media to drive views of a promo video for Chrome. Unruly Media paid bloggers to post the video. One blogger linked directly the the Chrome download page without using a nofollow attribute or intermediary to prevent giving link juice to the page. This violates Google’s paid link policy, for which penalties can range from a month to a year of penalized search rank.

Myself and other bloggers incorrectly assumed Google would not penalize itself. Honestly, I’m impressed with the severity of the penalty. Chrome used to rank #2 for a search for “browser”, now it’s #50. Google’s sponsored result ad for Chrome still appears atop the “browser” search, though.

It still seems questionable that Google says it didn’t expect Unruly to do a pay-per-post (PPP) sponsored blog campaign considering that’s the primary type of advertising Unruly does. Cutts says “Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent result of that”. Google told Search Engine Land, “Google did not authorize this campaign”.

I actually don’t think Google is lying. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d imagine Google would have made sure Unruly passed along its policies if it planned the campaign. Unruly does distribute videos through StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Maybe that’s where Google thought it its ad dollars were going. If Google wants to put the issue to rest, it should provide a specific explanation of exactly what it thought it was buying through Unruly.

Hopefully the flack Google took for the garbage content PPP campaign will disuade reputable companies from using this kind of advertising in the future. At first I blamed bloggers for accepting PPP campaigns selling out their audiences. But really, cash flush companies bribing starving bloggers seems almost coercive. I’d love to see Unruly Media crumble right after taking a $25 million funding round today.

[Image Credit: Search Engine Land]

Here’s an interesting little project that, while it’s unlikely to grow into a major product, nevertheless demonstrates the potential of alternative interfaces. Bruno Zamborlin’s Mogees (an abbreviation of “mosaicing gestural surface”) takes input from a contact microphone and analyzes it to determine the placement and direction of gestures on any surface through which vibrations can be detected.

I wrote a while back about how the “finger on a glass touchscreen” wasn’t the be-all and end-all of user interaction. The stylus, for example, has much life left in it. And interfaces we haven’t even thought of will emerge as well. Why not a puck that turns your table into a touchable surface?

It really has to be seen to be understood:

Naturally this demonstration doesn’t speak to the practicality of using it to, say, scroll down a webpage or control a cursor. But don’t you kind of get tired of resting your hand on your laptop, inching your fingers along a patch of plastic or glass to move the next paragraph into view, or some such action? I like the idea of taking gestures off of the device itself and moving them into its vicinity.

And objections to this particular system are ready enough: how would ambient vibrations and music affect it? What about typing? And so on.

But the point isn’t to take this device and apply it in your mind to something for which it wasn’t designed (the Mogees is a sound creation and control device). It’s to take the idea of taking what you have and doing something new with it. What if you could put your iPhone on the table and, if it rang, tap the table once to answer, tap twice for speakerphone, put your whole hand down to silence it, etc?

This particular item may be more suited to Theramin-style musical noodling, but it descends from a larger concept of disengaging the controls for a device from the device itself — of improvising the medium of interaction but retaining the content.

[via Extremetech]

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter@chasedave.

Fifteen years ago the Internet was revolutionizing global communications and computing so companies were looking for the most advanced markets to test their technologies. Locales such as Korea and Singapore portended the future. Today, no less than reinvention of healthcare is taking place. A key question is which locales will provide a similar testbed for healthtech. It’s not always the obvious places.

Healthcare providers such as the Mayo Clinic have been at the vanguard of adopting new technologies and approaches. However, this remains a provider-centric approach and the Mayo Clinic has far more resources than a community hospital or clinic. Ultimately, a broader community-focused effort can demonstrate how new approaches can scale nationally across a wide array of settings. That is, an approach that spans all income and demographic sectors as well as a range from urban to rural settings.

Consider the case of the St. Luke’s Health System based in Boise, Idaho. Not only is Boise the home to an exciting college football program and HP’s Printer division, it has more diversity than one might imagine. For example, Dr. Ted Epperly is the recent past President of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) and has a practice that has 48 languages spoken in it, as Boise is one of the key locations where refugees from war-torn countries are relocated.

St. Luke’s Wood River Valley two hours away in the mountains is located in the first destination ski resort in the country, Sun Valley. Though it’s a resort town, it serves a 5,000 square mile area that includes a recent AAFP doctor of the year who has to fly to remote communities a few times a week to serve his patients.  They also serve farming communities with a large immigrant workforce. In other words, St. Luke’s is a microcosm of the U.S. healthcare system with large city hospitals down to small remote clinics. This opportunity hasn’t been lost on individuals who have a strong motivation to provide nationwide leadership.

Dr. David Pate is the CEO of the health system and was named one of the most powerful physician executives by Modern Healthcare magazine.  One of the key reasons Dr. Pate joined St. Luke’s was he felt it was the ideal size and environment to reshape healthcare. St. Luke’s is big enough (with over $1 billion in operating budget) yet not too big where it’s exceedingly difficult to effect change. He hired Tony Tomazic who came out of one of the most successful innovation centers within the payor community, Humana. Tomazic was named the Chief Transformation Officer to provide day-to-day leadership of the transformation.

More recently, Tomazic hired a biotech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Bill Boeger, to help run the Center for Healthcare Innovation based out of the Wood River Valley area. One way Boeger described his charter is to develop St. Luke’s next hospital. However, this “hospital” would be one without walls. While businesses consider necessary changes brought on by health reform, The Center for Healthcare Innovation is challenged to think 2-10 years out.

Whether it’s mobile devices, telehealth, patient engagement tools, or new care & payment models, St. Luke’s will lead in a living laboratory. We’ve already seen the first hospitals at home, but there’s sure to be more innovation to provide care beyond the typical healthcare facility.

The opportunity with St. Luke’s Center for Healthcare Innovation isn’t lost on some of the breakthrough thinkers in healthcare. Dartmouth has a new program that is first-of-its-kind providing a Master in Health Care Delivery Science with an extraordinary faculty and student base. As they state, “The problems of health care throughout the world are not primarily ones of medical knowledge or even political will but of effective management and execution.” One of their project locations will be in the Wood River Valley where they can put that philosophy to the test.

While Boeger is less than one month into his job, he’s already thinking through venture philanthropy models to accelerate exciting new projects. St. Luke’s can look to other non-profits who have successfully used a venture philanthropy model such as the MS Society. The Society’s “Fast Forward” program in its short existence has already demonstrated how it’s accelerating the commercialization of new therapies by helping companies bridge the gap from research to commercialization.

Donors are eager to support double bottom-line initiatives such as Fast Forward. With well-known VCs such as Bing Gordon, Doug Leone and many other highly successful entrepreneurs spending some or all of their time in the Sun Valley area, St. Luke’s is optimistic that a venture philanthropy model can help them make a major impact in their community and beyond.

There are innovation centers at pharmaceutical and insurance companies but they don’t possess the advantage of a direct connection with individuals and must take a broader view. By taking an approach that leads with the community and individuals, rather than an institution, there’s a great opportunity for technology companies to test their wares in the real world with St. Luke’s direct connection to individuals, community and business leaders critical to having a broad-based success.

Imagine St. Luke’s with a communications channel with a large swath of the individuals in their community as their trusted healthcare provider. The following are a few benefits that can be realized for their community, technology partners and St. Luke’s itself:

• A baseline of individual’s health can be established to test the efficacy of diabetes, hypertension and other disease management programs as well as public awareness of various public health issues;
• Non-traditional consumer-focused “prescriptions” such as a provider encouraging a patient to use a game such as Mindbloom or mobile application to improve their health can be tested to see if they are effective at improving health outcomes;
• Transparency: not only are St. Luke’s clinicians able to communicate with their patients but so are the other health professionals in the community;
• Providers realize that the most important member of the patient’s care team is the patient themselves as the 99% of their life when they are away from the healthcare provider is when they maintain or return to health. Providers are increasingly rewarded for positive health outcomes and penalized for negative outcomes (e.g., hospital readmits) so they need to learn what behaviors they can impact while the patient is away from their facility.

The “do more, bill more” model of healthcare reimbursement is being replaced by a model I refer to as Collaborative Care that is patient centric, accountable and coordinated – pretty much the opposite of what we’ve been. Led by a prominent physician/CEO who aspires to lead a transformation of a traditional health system, St. Luke’s is embarking on a multi-year journey that will be interesting to follow.

As the famous line from the Field of Dreams stated, “If you build it, he will come.” In this case, “he” will be the array of innovators looking to prove their mettle in the cities, towns, farmlands and mountains of Idaho. St. Luke’s has signaled they are “open for business” to the wide array of innovators reinventing healthcare.

Related story: Healthcare Disruption: Providers Are Making Newspaper Industry Mistakes

To combat the lack of transparency around customer satisfaction with daily deals, Groupon today launched a new version of its Merchant Center. It includes the real-time percentage of deal customers who would recommend the business to a friend, plus their comments. Customer satisfaction is a big question for merchants wondering if they should start or continue running daily deals. Data on satisfaction rates is scarce, though. Worse,  a 2010 study showed that just 36% of customers spend more than the value of a deal, and just 20% return to the business. The feature could be a double-edged sword, encouraging retention or desertion depending on a merchant’s feedback.

The new Merchant Center is now available to all Groupon merchants. It also includes the deal statistics feature launched last month which shows aggregate buyer demographics including zip code, gender, and age.

The customer feedback system may not be totally accurate, though. To calculate the satisfaction rates, Groupon surveys users immediately after they redeem a deal. So far, only 1 million customers have left feedback, so merchants won’t always have a representative sample. The comments may also be highly polarized, with only those who truly love or hate a deal taking the time to respond in words.

Considering chronic gripes about fine print deal term, and employee dissatisfaction than can influence the customer experience, the new feedback stats are a gamble for Groupon. Previously, merchants may have assumed customers were happy since they were getting a big discount. Positive review may also have less influence on a merchant’s decision to stick with Groupon than whether it’s actually helping their business. Meanwhile, a poor recommendation rating or an especially pissed off commenter could lead them to ditch the daily deals service.

In the gaming world, there are gamers, there are hardcore gamers… and then there are flight sim players. These guys exist on a plane of dedication that they can claim almost exclusively, with a degree of commitment matched only by their spiritual brothers: the train sim players.

Alas, no level of dedication can pay to keep the lights on if the fan base simply isn’t big enough… hence the layoff of Microsoft’s entire Flight Simulator team back in 2009. Looking to start afresh and bring new blood (and new wallets) into the fan base, Microsoft’s taking a different approach with their latest game, Flight: it’s going freemium.

Microsoft Flight will be free-to-play when it’s released sometime this Spring… as long as you’re only looking to fly over Hawaii’s Big Island. If you’re looking to expand your horizons with new locations (or to fly in any other planes besides what comes included), you’ll need to cough up some change.

This is… actually quite clever. Microsoft’s problem has never been getting a few people people hooked — it’s getting them to play in the first place. With a freemium model, the user base should spike straight up. And for every player that sticks around and invests in a triple monitor set-up with dedicated cockpit controls, they’ll have a mountain of DLC awaiting. The first hit is free, as they say.

We’ll have to see just how well the game gets embraced by Flight Simulator’s current fan base, though — so far, most of the audiences comments seem to be harping on it as little more than a minor upgrade or bashing its graphics engine. But hey — it’s (sorta) free!

Poor Kodak. At this point, they’re just along for the ride. The last few years have been rough on them, and they’ve made a few big decisions that haven’t panned out. I must admit that while my unsolicited advice to them was sound, it probably would have to have been put in place a decade ago for them to have avoided the current state of things. As it is, the WSJ has word that they are planning to file Chapter 11 and do a court-supervised auction of their many digital imaging patents.

It’s sad, but the truth is that while Kodak is very much still a valuable company, it’s simply not a viable business any more. Their efforts to change the business they’re in came too late — and now they’re in the business of going under.

In some ways, it’s a good call (not that I’m a big bankruptcy expert), but it’s also risky. Kodak has been trying to offload more than a thousand patents in order to gain the cash it needs to keep operating. It’s not clear what exactly they’d be doing after they sold off the most valuable part of the company, but they might have noted that “a living dog is better than a dead lion,” and opted for solvency and a lease on life.

Whatever their intentions, the patents haven’t sold. They sold their sensor business related assets, but the patents are still on the shelf. Why? Kodak practically invented the digital camera, and some of their IP must surely be useful to the likes of Sony or Samsung.

The problem, I’m guessing, is this: why pay full price when you know the store’s going out of business? If Sony and Samsung both wanted a set of patents, Kodak would keep them both informed if the other bid something, so they run little risk of having their targets slipped out from under their noses. And in the meantime, Kodak swirls endlessly towards bankruptcy, at which point the whole patent portfolio will be on the block for public bidding and unbeatable prices.

Unfortunately, it’s extremely unlikely that Kodak will bounce back from this. The only way they can live is by selling their core assets and taking a fortune in loans, and after that there’s nothing to do but sell the brand and find work as a badge for other people’s products. Oh fate most ignominious! But it is their own doing.

[image source]

Keeping up with TechCrunch can be overwhelming. And sometimes great posts get lost in the flow, pushed down the homepage before many readers even get a chance to see them. If you click on the subject tabs at the top of the site, you can filter by subjects such as Startups, Mobile, Gadgets, and Enterprise. But we are going to add even more ways to filter all the posts and videos that make it onto TechCrunch in the coming months. If you look up in the Hot Topics links right below the TC logo, you will see a new feature that just went live: Editor’s Picks.

There you will find our standout posts—ranging from investigations and scoops to arguments and analysis. These are the posts that will make you think. They will introduce you to new ideas, startups and technologies. These aren’t necessarily the posts that get the most pageviews or headlines on TechMeme, Hacker News or LinkedIn Today. They are the stories we think are the most important and worthy of attention.

The picks go back about a month right now, and new posts will be added daily. Some recent picks include Leena Rao’s excellent overview of how mobile technologies are transforming retail; Jason Kincaid’s investigation into Apple’s curious relationship with a patent troll; Alexia Tsotsis’ essay on why the “Normals” shouldn’t be ignored; Greg Kumparak on why Siri is making Microsoft look bad; Josh Constine’s tour of 6 Big HealthTech ideas that could change medicine; Robin Wauters’ defense of Windows Phone; Sarah Perez’ discussion of how mobile apps can become more like the web; Eric Eldon’s analysis of Facebook’s market saturation; John Biggs on the importance of the Kindle Fire; and (now-columnist) MG Siegler’s debunking of Android’s openness.

You will find posts from contributors and columnists there as well. This is just one small way to help you pull out some signal from the noise. Enjoy.

A new year is always exciting. A clean slate. But once every four years, something very important comes into play: a presidential election. This year, all of your election information won’t be any more readily available than it is right here, on the interwebs, and Google is set to be your go-to place to keep up with them.

Today via the Official Google Blog, the search giant has launched Google.com/elections — “an election hub where citizens can study, watch, discuss, learn about, participate in and perhaps even make an impact on the digital campaign trail as it blazes forward to Tuesday, November 6, 2012.”

You’ll be able to sort through election info based on popularity, the candidates, and the issues, and the Trends dashboard will keep you up-to-date on what’s happening now. For the most part, it’s very similar to any of Google’s other Google News sub-pages, but obviously with more focus.

The big day is going to sneak up on us sooner than you think, and Google’s choice to get out ahead of the madness is a beneficial one. Information is our best friend come election day, and Google.com/elections can only help.

It’s been a long time since I clacked away on a C64 but I remember that hunk of pure computing power like it was yesterday. The keyboard (complete with dingbats on the front surface), the power light that glowed like a monocular rat eye, the lines of dust that formed in the 80s-era case. It was a simpler time.

That’s right: the Commodore 64 is 30 years old this week, appearing at CES in 1982 and ending up in third-grade classrooms and kids’ rooms for years after until, unceremoniously, millions of school custodians and parents dumped them in the trash as the PC took over desktops all over the world.

The original 64 had 64KB of RAM but only 32KB was addressable by BASIC, a little advertising trick that has been repeated again and again, most recently in regards to the space available on the Nook Tablet. RegHardware has an excellent look back at the platform if you’re so inclined but just look at the computing power you could get for the price of an off-contract iPhone back in 1982.

The crazy thing? You can actually buy one right now if you want, complete with DVD drive. I’m sure plenty of C64 fanboys have died of dysentery and gone to heaven.

via BB